Atlas Shrugged – Day 046 – pp. 449-458
We cut back to Hank’s office. It’s late. He got Ken Danagger’s message from Dagny when she told him the story.
He’s bummed and thinking. . .
“Closing his eyes, he permitted himself to experience for a moment the immense relief he would feel if he, too, were to walk off, abandoning everything. Under the shock of his loss, he felt a thin thread of envy.”
“Why didn’t they come for me too, whoever they are, and give me that irresistible reason which would make me go? But in the next moment, his shudder of anger told him that he would murder the man who’d attempt to approach him. . .”
Everyone of his brothers in arms has disappeared. He doesn’t know why.
So there he stands, entertaining an ever-so-faint glimmer of surrender, forcing himself to remain firm in his losing battle. Sheeesh.
He grabs his coat to leave when in the waiting room he spots a lone figure.
“It was only an instant, almost too brief to grasp, because it seemed to him that Francisco rose at once at his entrance, with a movement of courteous deference.”
Francisco knows the reason that Hank’s hanging around the office so late (and not the Lillian reason.) Hank invites him in.
“Why did you come here?”
“You don’t want me to answer, Mr, Rearden. You wouldn’t admit to me or to yourself how desperately lonely you are tonight. If you don’t question me, you won’t feel obliged to deny it. Just accept what you do know, anyway: that I know it.”
I know that you know that I know that you know. . . ?
“Why should you care? And why should I need your help tonight?”
“Because it’s not easy to have to damn the man who meant most to you.”
“I wouldn’t’ damn you if you’s only stay away from me.”
Oops. A little slip there.
Ken Danagger’s disappearance is going to make life harder for Hank.
“Francisco looked at a steel bridge traced in black strokes against red steam beyond the window, and said pointing, “Every one of those girders has a limit to the load it can carry What’s yours?”
More riddles.
Hank declares he has no limits. At this point one might actually believe him. That or he’s reaching a point of . . . what’s the word . . . insanity, raging against the G machine. Who will battle it to the death.
But Francisco’s come to try and talk some sense to him. Everything he has built and accomplished in his life has been done for a moral reason. In order to exchange his best effort for a profit. And yet the building of the John Galt Line — one of his proudest accomplishments — ain’t bringing him any profit.
“When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished?. . . By every standard of decency, of honor, of justice know to you — are yo convinced that you should have been rewarded for it? . . . Then if you were punished, instead — what sort of code have you accepted?”
He makes a good point. All the men for whom Rearden built his rail — the Ellis Wyatts, even the Eddie Willers — are gone. And all the “whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk. . .” are cashing in.
Seem fair?
Hank gets the point.
“You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr,Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren’t? What if you’re placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire?”
Now there’s a moral conundrum.
“You won’t allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal — what have you allowed into your moral code?”
He’s right. And Hank’s got nothing. No comeback, no response.
“Mr. Rearden, if you say Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders — what would you tell him to do?”
“I. . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”
Francisco starts to continue when suddenly the silence is shattered by the scream an alarm. Trouble at the mill.
As the alarm warning penetrates Rearden’s consciousness, he sees that Francisco is already up and running for the door. Hank chases after but by the time he catches him, he’s found Francisco at the mouth of the broken furnace — spewing hot streams of molten Rearden Metal — throwing bullets of “fire clay” to seal the hole.
Rearden grabs a pair of safety glasses and rushes to join him in the battle to save the furnace.
Suddenly he sees Francisco throw a block of clay only to lose his balance and begin to totter into the pit. Without thinking Hank hurdles the cavern of blazing molten metal and grabs Francisco before he can fall forward. He saves his friend.
(God, I hope they don’t kiss.)